Congratulations to Missoulian photography editor Kurt Wilson, who reminded us all today of what it takes to come back to the newsroom with great spot news photography: hustle (getting to the right [...]]]>

A black bear falls into the waiting net of its rescuers after being tranquilized outside an apartment building on East Broadway. KURT WILSON/Missoulian

Congratulations to Missoulian photography editor Kurt Wilson, who reminded us all today of what it takes to come back to the newsroom with great spot news photography: hustle (getting to the right place at the right time – on time), patience (wait, wait, wait for the right moment) and an eye for what makes a particular scene or situation like no other (That bear is right downtown! Right there on East Broadway!)

Sherry Devlin

We’ve thought we were pretty clever about finding new uses for Twitter, here in the Missoulian newsroom.

But we will never be as clever – or as heroic – as the Japanese journalist who tricked his captors in Afghanistan and used Twitter to let the outside world know he was alive.

Here’s the Associated Press story on [...]]]>

We’ve thought we were pretty clever about finding new uses for Twitter, here in the Missoulian newsroom.

Here’s the Associated Press story on Kosuke Tsuneoka’s best-ever use of Twitter:

TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese journalist held hostage in Afghanistan for five months managed to send out a message via Twitter that he was alive when his captors asked him how to use a cell phone.

Just days before he was freed, Kosuke Tsuneoka said one of the militants brought him his new cell phone and asked the prisoner to set it up.

The younger militants were more interested in accessing Al-Jazeera on the phone, but Tsuneoka shifted their attention to Twitter, successfully getting them to ask him to demonstrate how it worked. He then sent the two following tweets: “i am still allive, but in jail” and “here is archi in kunduz. in the jail of commander lativ.”

“That’s how I got the message out,” Tsuneoka told a news conference in Tokyo on Tuesday, a day after he arrived safely back in Japan. “I’m sure they never thought they were tricked.”

A couple of days later, the militants — whom Tsuneoka said identified themselves as members of Hizb-e-Islami but posed as Taliban to the Japanese government — set him free in part because he is a Muslim. He had converted to Islam in 2000.

The Japanese government said it paid no ransom to free Tsuneoka. He said he believes that because the captors didn’t seem to be overjoyed at the time of his release or suggest they had received any cash.

During his five-month captivity in northern provinces of Kunduz and Takhar, the freelance journalist thought he would never get out alive.

“I thought I would be certainly killed, so I tried to prepare myself to face it,” he recalled. His fear reached its peak in late June, when the captors issued an ultimatum to the Japanese government, threatening to kill him if their demands were not met within 72 hours.

When the time passed, and there was no sign they were going to kill him, he started to think he could survive and gain freedom at some point.

“Although it was frustrating that I didn’t know when that might be, my fear of death gradually faded and I felt better,” he said.

Tsuneoka said after that, anger rather than fear helped him survive the ordeal. Even though his captors fed him well and never used violence, he repeatedly thought about how he could retaliate against them.

“They are a bunch of thieves just trying to extort money from Japan,” he said.

The rest was boredom. He had nothing to do but sleep, gaze out the window to see birds or count ants crawling on the dirt floor, when the young militants were not around to talk.

Tsuneoka was kidnapped in April, when he traveled to a Taliban-controlled area in northern Afghanistan, and was released Saturday night to a Japanese Embassy.

Tsuneoka had been abducted before. He disappeared in Georgia in 2001 and was held for several months by unidentified individuals, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. He was freed during a Georgian military operation.

Tsuneoka is the latest of more than half a dozen foreign journalists kidnapped in Afghanistan, including two French reporters who were seized last December in Kapisa province just outside Kabul.

It took a few minutes to wake up enough to realize that professional newscaster was indeed the same little girl who I once put in timeout when she shoved [...]]]>

One night a few years back, after falling asleep while watching TV, I woke to see one of my daughter’s childhood friends reading the news on MontanaPBS.

Sherry Devlin

He’ll spend time in the school, focusing on [...]]]>

The Missoulian began a new yearlong series today, with the publication of reporter Jamie Kelly’s first “Hall Passages” story. Each week on a rotating basis, Jamie will visit a private or public school in the Missoula Valley to see what’s new in the halls of our learning institutions.

Sherry Devlin

Michael has accepted a position with the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit whose mission it is to protect and enhance America’s national parks.

He [...]]]>

This week, our newsroom bids farewell to a treasured longtime reporter, Michael Jamison, who for 15 years has covered Glacier National Park, Flathead and Lincoln counties, and everything in-between for the Missoulian.

Michael has accepted a position with the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit whose mission it is to protect and enhance America’s national parks.

He will take over as program manager of NPCA’s Crown of the Continent initiative, implementing collaborative efforts to protect the Crown ecosystem – with Glacier National Park at its heart – during this time of changing climate and changing mountain environments.

He will be deeply missed by us all.

But we also wish him well on this new venture, which offers him a whole new world of challenges and opportunities.

We are moving quickly to fill Jamison’s position in the Flathead Valley, as that coverage is essential to our newspaper and our readers. In fact, we’ll interview the first candidate for the job this Thursday.

In the meantime, I hope you all will join me in thanking Michael for his dedication and commitment – and for thousands of excellent stories that he provided for the Missoulian. You have done incredible work here, Michael, and will do amazing things in your new role, I am certain. Thank you, thank you, thank you, from us all.

Sherry Devlin

It’s Labor Day, and that means the “official” – or at least the traditional – start of the fall campaign season. And while much has been made about Montana’s lack of fiery statewide races this year, there are dozens of very significant local races.

Control of the 2011 Montana Legislature will be decided in each and [...]]]>

It’s Labor Day, and that means the “official” – or at least the traditional – start of the fall campaign season. And while much has been made about Montana’s lack of fiery statewide races this year, there are dozens of very significant local races.

Sherry Devlin

For its part, the AP discussed and then implemented a [...]]]>

The Associated Press issued an excellent new policy this past week that I thought you’d want to know about. It addresses a concern I’ve shared with you before – how to let web readers know the source and reliability of information they’re reading in news stories.

Here’s the entire policy, for your perusal, as received by the Missoulian last week from the AP’s Michael Oreskes. It’s an excellent policy for a new and ever-changing news industry.

Colleagues,

In the age of the Web, the sourcing and reliability of information has become ever more crucial. So it is more important than ever that we be consistent and transparent in our handling of information that originated elsewhere than our own reporting.

Therefore, here is our policy for crediting other news organizations in our reporting. This policy is aimed at introducing consistency to our practices around the world, and applies to our print, broadcast and online news reports.

The policy addresses two kinds of situations:

● Attributing to other organizations information that we haven’t independently reported.

● Giving credit to another organization that broke a story first, even when we match it — or advance it — through our own reporting.

Attributing facts we haven’t gathered or confirmed on our own:

We should provide attribution whether the other organization is a newspaper, website, broadcaster or blog; whether or not it’s U.S. based; and whether or not it’s an AP member or subscriber.

This policy applies to all reports in all media, from short pieces, such as NewsNows and initial broadcast reports, to longer pieces aimed at print publication.

It applies once we have decided that we need to pick up the material – and for those decisions, the usual judgments still apply.

The attribution doesn’t always have to be at the start of a story or script; it can sometimes be two or three graphs down. But we do need to say where the information came from.

If some information comes from another organization and some is ours, we should credit ourselves for what’s ours and the other organization for what’s theirs. (If the material from the other source turns out to be wrong, we’ll cite them in any corrective we do later.)

It’s important to note that we shouldn’t use facts from a non-member news organization, even with credit, so frequently that we appear to be systematically and continuously free riding on that organization’s work.

Crediting other organizations when they break a story and we match or further develop it:

If organization X breaks a story and we then match it through our own original reporting, we should say something like this: “The secret meeting in Paris was initially reported by X.”

This policy applies to spot stories as well as enterprise and investigative pieces.

Sometimes our reporting goes so far beyond the other organization’s report that AP’s story is substantially our work. In such a case, we should still credit the other organization, though the credit can be farther down in the story. Suppose Blog Y reports that the government has compiled a secret report on something, but we’re the first to find out what it says. We should still say, lower in the story, that “The existence of the report was first reported by Blog Y.”

If there are many elements to a story, we don’t have to catalog who reported each element first. The goal is simply to give credit to whoever got the story started or added some significant new angle.

As always, our standards editor, Tom Kent, is available to help think through the application of these broad policies.

The points above raise some special questions for operations in the United States, so here’s a Q&A on these:

Q. In the United States, we’ve long given attribution to members on true scoops and enterprise. But often we haven’t included such attribution on spot news, on the theory that AP and its members are a cooperative and therefore a single publishing source. What’s changed?

A. While it’s true that AP has the right to use spot news from our members, as journalists we should tell our readers where the information originated. Members in many states have also been asking for this change as they seek to drive traffic to their websites.

Q. We already use “Information from” lines with URLs at the end of stories. Isn’t that enough?

A. No. The attribution should be in the body of the story. We will also continue to use “Information from” lines with URLs in cases where we do now.

Q. What if information in a story comes from several organizations?

A. If several organizations are reporting different things — for instance, in a fast-breaking news situation — we should definitely make clear where each fact comes from. This is important for clarity and for the credibility of the story. If reports from several organizations on something match, we can give attribution to the first source we relied on for the information.

Q. Does this policy apply to U.S. broadcast as well as newspaper/online copy?

A. Yes.

Mike Oreskes, Associated Press

Political cartoonist Paul Conrad, who made both the elite list of three-time Pulitzer Prize winners and Richard Nixon’s enemies list, has died.

His commentary and cartoons will be missed – if not by politicians of both parties, certainly by readers and journalists.

Here is the Associated Press obituary for Conrad, and a few of his cartoons.

By ANDREW [...]]]>

Political cartoonist Paul Conrad, who made both the elite list of three-time Pulitzer Prize winners and Richard Nixon’s enemies list, has died.

Here is the Associated Press obituary for Conrad, and a few of his cartoons.

By ANDREW DALTON
Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) — For more than half a century, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Paul Conrad poked fun at politicians, taking on presidents from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush.

Conrad, who died Saturday at age 86, won the coveted prize three times for his efforts but he also made Richard Nixon’s enemies list.

He died at his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Rancho Palos Verdes surrounded by his family, his son David Conrad said. The death was from natural causes, David Conrad said, but he did not offer specifics.

Conrad worked in the heyday of political cartoonists, and he was among the elite. His three decades at the Los Angeles Times helped the newspaper raise its national profile.

His total of three Pulitzers is matched by just two other cartoonists in the Post-World War II era.

He was fierce in his liberalism and expressed it with a stark, powerful visual style. Southern California political junkies for decades would start their day either outraged or delighted at a Conrad drawing.

The Times said in a Saturday story that its longtime publisher came to expect that his breakfast would be interrupted by an angry phone call from then-governor Reagan or wife Nancy, peeved by a Conrad cartoon that made them look foolish.

Conrad’s favorite target was Nixon. At the time of the president’s resignation, Conrad drew Nixon’s helicopter leaving the White House with the caption: “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.”

“He always said he was most proud of being on Nixon’s enemies list,” David Conrad said.

In a 2006 interview with The Associated Press, Conrad compared his favorite target to then-president George W. Bush.

“I felt two ways about Nixon. First, how did an idiot like that become president,” said Conrad, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native. “And, secondly, how soon can we get rid of him. Almost the same thing applies to Bush.”

One of Conrad’s final images showed Bush as Sisyphus, rolling a huge boulder labeled “Iraq” up a hill.

Democratic politicians weren’t safe from his barbs either.

After Jimmy Carter admitted that at times he had “lusted in his heart,” Conrad drew him mentally undressing the Statue of Liberty.

Conrad and his identical twin James were born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1924, the sons of a railroad worker who dabbled in art. The Times said Conrad later joked that his first political cartoon was a scrawl on the bathroom wall at his elementary school.

After serving in the Pacific during World War II in the Army Corps of Engineers, he majored in art at the University of Iowa, and an old family friend convinced him to draw cartoons for the college paper.

His first job after college was at the Denver Post, where he worked for 14 years before moving to Los Angeles.

By late in his life, only a small number of newspapers had cartoonists on staff, and many of them had abandoned the traditional single-panel image for a comic-strip approach that Conrad disdained.

“It’s dialogue, long conversations, from one panel to another,” Conrad told the AP. “Some have a political point but when you get finished reading them you knew that in the beginning. So what am I doing reading ‘em?”

Conrad’s drawings were anything but busy or complex. They were always a single panel and often a single figure, rendered in sharp, long lines that made his subjects look bony and sometimes sinister. He rarely used dialogue and kept words to a minimum.

“Conrad’s work is immediate. It’s high impact. There’s emotion in it. If he were a boxer, he’d be giving body blows,” Denver Post cartoonist Mike Keefe told the AP in 2006.

And despite the humor in a lot of his work, Conrad’s style had a seriousness that other cartoonists lacked.

As narrator in a PBS documentary on Conrad, Tom Brokaw said: “Every line he draws cries out to the powers that be, ‘We’re watching you.’”

In addition to David, Paul Conrad is survived by another son, two daughters, and his wife of more than 60 years, Kay.

Memorial plans were still uncertain, David Conrad said.

Here’s one of the things I’ve loved about hanging around newspapers all my working life: the smell of a new edition of the paper coming off the press.

Now, thanks to a Missoula couple, I can log that pleasant inky aroma on a global map of smelly places. And on Sunday, thanks to reporter Keila Szpaller, [...]]]>

Here’s one of the things I’ve loved about hanging around newspapers all my working life: the smell of a new edition of the paper coming off the press.

Sherry Devlin

I love high school football games – especially those on great September evenings when the weather is still warm!

And the very best of those games are the crosstown rivalries, where the grandstands are filled on both sides of the field and a whole bunch of bragging rights are on the line.

One such contest is tonight [...]]]>

I love high school football games – especially those on great September evenings when the weather is still warm!

Sherry Devlin